A life in pictures (part two)

For Henri Cartier-Bresson, human life is a precarious balancing act between two worlds: the one inside us and the one outside. And his photographs, he says, are instant drawings of that act, no more, no less. Which is why, all these years later, his work still bursts with a vitality and visual honesty that are so lacking in today's mannered style. On the eve of the great photographer's 90th birthday, marked by four new major exhibitions of his work, Liz Jobey meets the man responsible for some of the century's most enduring images

When Paris was liberated in 1944, he was among the photographers officially recording the celebrations. In one of his pictures, as he discovered later, he had accidentally taken a picture of George Rodger, whom he didn't yet know, riding on the side of a tank. (Capa had met Rodger outside Naples in 1943, when both were following the Allied advance through Italy, and had talked to him about setting up a photographer's co-operative when the war was over.) For Cartier-Bresson, the war was a turning point. 'I couldn't go back to painting and drawing. After everything that had gone on in the war, I didn't feel like going back to an easel.

The camera was there to record the world, and I went back to photography because of my curiosity about what was going on.' He lifted his chin a fraction and made a delicate sniffing noise. 'Reportage for me means sniffing around the world - 'What's going on?' It's not like a writer. You don't pass judgment. You just say: 'I felt this', 'I've seen that'. It's always subjective. It's related to who you are. There's no such thing as objectivity. Just like there's no truth. It's always in relation to something.' The first thing he did after Liberation, however, was make a documentary about the return of French refugees and deportees from Germany, and, while making it, he took one of his most famous photographs, the denunciation of a female Gestapo informer at a camp in Dessau. It is a picture of two women whose roles have suddenly and miraculously been reversed, and in their expressions - the sullen, shameful resignation of one and the absolute triumph of the other - you can read all the hatred and mutual disgust of the preceding five years.

The war had brought America and Europe closer together, but, in Cartier-Bresson's case, not quite close enough. In 1946 he sailed for New York, where the Museum of Modern Art was preparing a posthumous exhibition of his photographs. They believed he had been killed in the war, and he thought he should be there. He was still in America when he got the news that he had become a founder member of Magnum. He had never thought of himself as a reporter, and he prized his independence. Even now, in his eagerness to supply examples of what a bad a journalist he is (notably the night he had met Nureyev, who had just defected, in Paris and never lifted his camera even once), you get a glimpse of the intransigence that reportedly infuriated bureau chiefs at Magnum and editors at Life. But if he had doubts about the wisdom of joining Magnum in the beginning, Capa soon put him straight. In a letter to John Szarkowski, head of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, Cartier-Bresson wrote: 'At the time of my exhibition at MoMA in 1946, Robert Capa warned me: 'Watch out for labels. They are reassuring. But people will attach one to you that you will not be able to remove. That of the little Surrealist photographer . . . You will be lost, you will become precious and mannered. Continue in the way you are going, but with the label of photojournalist, and keep the rest in your heart of hearts. This will place you directly in touch with what is happening in the world.' Capa, for convenience, had divided the world into four parts, and Cartier-Bresson's 'beat' was the Far East. By the summer of 1948, he was eager to get to India for Independence. Just before the war, he had married a Javanese poet and dancer, Ratna Mohini, and they travelled together, arriving too late for the celebrations. But through his wife's connections, Cartier-Bresson was invited to meet Gandhi. Less than an hour later, Gandhi was assassinated, and Cartier-Bresson's photographs of his funeral were published in Life under the Magnum credit.

I asked him at one point if it had seemed imperative to travel widely after the war, and he corrected me quickly: 'I don't like travelling. I like to live in a country. Nowadays, people don't have time. I spent a year in Mexico and 30 years later went back and spent another year. I stayed a year in India. I was in Burma, and a Life telegram came and asked if I would be free to go to China. When I got to Peking in January 1949, I had a minimum of eight days and a maximum of 12 before the communist army walked in, and within that time I witnessed the last days of the Kuomintang.' He was on the last plane out, as Mao's troops were circling the airport, and landed in Shanghai, where he and his wife stayed for three months until, once again on the last available transport, this time by steamer, they sailed to Indonesia in time for Independence in December 1949.

Between 1948 and 1951, he lived in Asia, returning to Paris to work with Teriade (Efstatios Eleftheriades), the Greek-born art director and publisher, on Images a la Sauvette, which was published in 1952 in France and America with a cover illustration by Matisse. Les Europeens (only faintly connected to the current exhibition), with a cover by Miro, followed three years later. Cartier-Bresson says he never made a penny in royalties from either, but, indirectly, the first book made Magnum the largest amount of money in its then brief history and probably saved the agency from financial collapse.

In 1954, Robert Capa and Werner Bischof, one of the earliest members of Magnum, were killed within two weeks of each other: Capa by a land mine in Indo-China Bischof in a crash in Peru. At the Cannes Film Festival that year, a Russian director, Sergei Yutkevitch, won the special jury prize, and during his stay had been given a copy of Images a la Sauvette. When the Iron Curtain was lifted months later, Cartier-Bresson was invited to be the first photographer inside the Soviet Union. Life bought the pictures, according to Magnum, for Dollars 40,000.

The whole idea behind Magnum, including securing the copyright for the photographers' negatives, had been that each person would make their own choice as to the places and stories he or she wanted to cover. In the next two decades, Cartier-Bresson lived between Asia, Europe and America. He was in China for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, and back in the US to photograph Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Misfits. He went to Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Mexico, Cuba and the Soviet Union.

He was in Cuba at the time of the missile crisis in 1962, and when he came back to New York with the pictures, for the first time he was asked to write a story to go with them. Life offered a staff writer to help him, and this writer, Cartier-Bresson says with a glint in his eye, changed some of his sentences and generally reworked the text to his satisfaction. And then it was published. The inference was obvious: here was a man from the CIA who, in the most writerly way possible, was debriefing him. By the time he returned to the Soviet Union in 1972, he was quite inured to the various bugging and vetting obstacles, which didn't prevent him from bringing back pictures that hardly represent life under the great Soviet experiment at its most technologically sophisticated.

He couldn't remember the year exactly - it was sometime in the Sixties - when he had said to Teriade that he thought he should give up photography that he'd said all he could with the camera. And Teriade agreed. 'He told me, 'Go back to your first passion. Drawing and painting.' By 1966, he had produced ten books, the same number of major touring exhibitions, including two retrospectives, and his reputation was growing. Apart from his fears about repeating himself, it must have seemed as if the past was in danger of overtaking the present.

In 1966, he stepped down as a full member of Magnum, though the agency continued to distribute his pictures and he has maintained a guiding role. But as we talked about how a profit-sharing co-op was anathema to the present economic climate, and how magazine publishing was so consumer-driven, mention of the word 'market' had Cartier-Bresson spitting out his consonants in derision: 'Ren-ta-bil-i-te. The pressure of money. The only things that count now are efficiency and money. A handful of big concerns running the whole thing . . . Human feelings are reduced by all that.' The same disgust at the homogenising nature of technology applies to his feelings about colour reproduction: the market demands colour even though electronic colour is so limited, and so faithless to nature. 'Colour photography is extremely important for scientific purposes, and so on. But black-and-white has a strength of evocation.

'We are in a period of mannerism.

My passion is elsewhere. Mannerism is artificial precision. All this cerebral, cerebral, cerebral . . .' He shook his head in irritation. At the end of last year, he went to the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, curious to see what these Young British Artists were all about: 'Duchamp,' he said, after a brief detour into the origins of conceptual art, 'he was a very smart person extremely witty and dandy. And he has had a terrific influence. He was not a good painter at all. But, as I see it, when he was young and he saw people like Picasso and Chagall and so on, he did that (flicks his wrist in a gesture of dismissal): 'Psst! L'art est mort!' And now people start thinking, thinking, thinking. It's a mental trick.

'There is the sort of thinking that is pragmatic, which helps to make washing machines and clone sheep. And there is another level of thinking, which is poetry, imagination, compassion for human beings. There are two things you can't teach: sensitivity and imagination.' Duchamp is just one of the hundreds of artists, writers, poets, philosophers, politicians, composers that Cartier-Bresson has photographed over the years. Together with the occasional portrait of his friends and family, they make up his published collections. Frustratingly, his pictures aren't usually dated. It's something he feels strongly about, and resists whenever possible. 'Dates are important for reportage, because you're taking the pulse of a place or a situation, but not for portraits. People just look through them later and say, 'Hmm, she had a coup-de-vieux.' ' He then describes his portrait technique which, unsurprisingly, turns out to be more or less a non-technique. 'I make a courtesy visit. I stay a short time. Say 'Thank you, I've got it.' Put the camera down.' He pauses for effect.

'And then you catch him. Like this. No rule whatsoever. You have to be like a cat.' He thinks for a moment. 'It's a sort of fencing. I wrote it somewhere: 'You have to slip the camera between his skin and his shirt.' The most difficult thing is people who can't forget the presence of the camera and want to help you. To them, I have to say' - he waves a hand mercurially - 'No thank you! Goodbye!' Some of the most involving portraits are the ones with no captions at all. Without the preconceptions of celebrity, they engage on the level of mutual human curiosity. 'As time passes by and you look at portraits,' says Cartier-Bresson, 'the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace.

'In a painting or a drawing, a portrait is a reflection, in both senses of the word whereas with a camera' - he slices the air with the palm of his hand - 'like a razor-blade, it is immediate.' He is fascinated by the question of time, by how it is measured, and how different civilisations and religions have developed their own methods of defining and controlling it. 'The notion of time is something beautiful,' he says. 'For me, time is only the present second. Only that exists. The rest has gone, and will come eventually.

'But the problem of time has changed completely through the years. Since the discovery of quantum mathematics, time is not linear any more, and all the problems of coincidence are linked to that. There's a wonderful book about this by Arthur Koestler, called Coincidence. And - I'm coming back to our subject of photography - it's a coincidence, like elements of a poem that come together.' Next week, when the Hayward kicks off the celebrations for his 90th year, it will, no doubt, be the beginning of yet another round of plaudits and tributes for a man who seems way beyond their reach. Somewhere, he must have a corrective, an internal mechanism that accepts the idea of celebrity and then disables it, so he can politely detach himself from its effects. Zen? Maybe. He read me a dedication he had written to Jean Clair, the author of the introductory essay to the Hayward show, and suggested I copy it down. It was a flick of the wrist in the direction of fame, and not without self-irony.

'Allow me, dear Jean, to emphasise something a little. Here are 180 photos, 1932-1974, taken at 1/25th of a second, which makes, then - how to compute? - 180 x 1/25th (7.2 seconds). This was done in 41 years. Now let's subtract that number of seconds from the number of seconds in 41 years. How many will still be available? Then let's calculate how many seconds there are in a light year, just to know where we stand. Hurrah for eternity at 1/25th of a second!'

· The Europeans is at the Hayward Gallery, London, February 5-April 5 1998. Portraits is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from February 20-June 7 1998. Drawings is at the Royal College of Art, London, from March 6- April 9 1998. The V& A, London, will show a personal selection of Cartier-Bresson's pictures in November 98. Books of The Europeans (£29.95), Tete-A-Tete, a new selection of portraits, (£32, published February 23) and Line By Line, The Drawings Of Henri Cartier - Bresson (£28), are published by Thames & Hudson.